By Andrew Robinson
HORSHAM >> For as quickly as it all came together, it’s been a pretty solid WPSL debut season for the Philadelphia Ukrainian Nationals – Liberty this summer.
Looking to follow off the club’s men’s team having a terrific debut season in the NPSL last year, the groundwork was in place to field a women’s team next summer and use this year to get everything in place. But when another club wasn’t going to be able to field their team, the Liberty got the call saying if they could get their side together in just a couple weeks, the spot was theirs.
Playing one of their stronger matches as a group this season in Wednesday’s 2-1 loss to Fever SC, the WPSL team showed how far it has come in such short order and flashed some of its potential for the future.
“Every game is a building block, every practice is a building block,” midfielder Lindsey DeHaven said. “It’s all new players, I didn’t know anyone coming into this team, at least not as players so it’s been a learning experience but we’re building every single time and getting better every single time.
“We’re feeling each other out, feeling the game out, feeling our coaches out but it’s been good.”
The Liberty’s roster is loaded with players who made a name playing high school soccer in The Reporter/Times Herald/Montgomery Media area like DeHaven, a Pennridge graduate now heading into her junior year at High Point. Players that were rivals in high school at programs like CB South and CB West or William Tennent and Abington are now teammates uniting under the same crest as they figure out how to play with each other.
With a strong youth program and a women’s majors division team, there was a gap for college-aged players in the Ukrainian Nationals structure that a WPSL side would fill perfectly. Putting a roster together in short order proved a bit of a chaotic task, with coaches Dermot Carry and Marquita Feldman expending all their contacts and reaching out to anyone they could think of to try and bring in players.
They got it done, reaching the 40-player allotment for a roster and able to dress the full 20 for most fixtures so far since the league started up in late May.
Getting the product together on the pitch has been more of a work in progress, but Carry said the group has improved by leaps and bounds from their first session. Take Wednesday’s match for example, Fever SC handled the Liberty 5-2 in their first meeting but the rematch was a tight game that could have gone either way.
“Just from them being so quiet when they came in, they did not want to talk to each other, they did not want to get that connection together,” Carry said. “Our first two games, it was really, really tough. They barely knew each other’s names to turning around and actually getting to know each other and how each other played where we could get a formation out there on the pitch.”
The bulk of the team’s roster is current college players, with a mix of Division I, II and III from Paige Hoeger (Archbishop Wood/VCU) to Caroline Hughes (Abington/East Stroudsburg), Anna Fiore (North Penn/Post) and more, and there are also a few recently graduated high school seniors along with CB South rising senior Brooke Commins, a Lafayette recruit who also plays for the Ukies’ youth program. Feldman, who plays for the Ukrainian Nationals women’s majors team, has also played in a couple matches when the team was low on players but has mostly focused on leading training and helping the players improve.
Aly Cutter, a rising junior at West Chester and a CB South grad, scored the Liberty’s lone goal on Wednesday off a terrific strike early in the second half that made it 1-1. Even after playing in all 25 matches and scoring eight goals helping West Chester to the Division II national title match this past fall, Cutter was looking for a competitive and challenging environment this summer, which she found with the Liberty.
“It has to do with the coaches, they hold us to a high standard and everything we do in practice, we try to use in the games,” Cutter said. “We can hold each other accountable, we can get on each other and all be on the same page. Being unified as a one team, especially in a competitive league like this, it’s so important to be together.”
Carry and Feldman were effusive across the board in their praise of how open the players have been to them coaching them or having them try different things and they’re proud of the growth collectively and as individuals. It may not show in the goals allowed category, but the team’s defense has become a strength led by center back Bridget Curtis, a CB South grad going into her junior year at Kutztown after a first team All-PSAC fall.
Cutter has been a leader at forward and the coaches noted DeHaven’s toughness in the middle while crediting both of them for opening up their games to teammates they didn’t have a lot of familiarity with. Carry also noted defender Callie Abel, who just graduated from Quakertown and will play at Clarkson next year, as one of the players who has taken some big steps from the team’s initial training sessions and early matches.
As Feldman pointed out, there’s a huge jump from high school to college and some of the players on the Liberty’s roster haven’t yet seen the success or minutes they did with their high school or club teams. The WPSL schedule has also given some of them a way to get their confidence back or strengthen it, especially between the lines in a competitive setting.
Even DeHaven, who plays for a Division I program, said she doesn’t see herself as automatically better than anyone else who may play at a different level, a notion that Cutter also agreed with.
“You can see sometimes when you go up against someone that may go to a, what someone might say is a ‘better’ school than you or a bigger school than you, you can still compete with them,” Cutter said. “They’re in the same league as you, they’re an opponent and at the end of the day, we’re all college student-athletes, all playing at a high level and we’ve all dreamed about it since we were kids.
“An athlete is an athlete and when you step on the field, it doesn’t matter if you committed D-I, D-II or D-III.”
DeHaven said she has also enjoyed getting to know the teammates she saw as “enemies, in a sense,” during her high school tenure like Cutter and Curtis or Taylor Moyer, a rising sophomore at Saint Peter’s from CB West who had plenty of battles with Pennridge. This is the first summer DeHaven has played in a league and she’s already seeing the benefits of being a little more match-fit before she heads back to college for preseason in August.
The WPSL season wraps up on July 1, so the Liberty is hoping to keep trending upward to close out its first year and come back stronger next season. Many of the players are already talking about wanting to return next summer and Carry is hoping with a full year of preparation, the team will be in a position to have tryouts next season.
“That’s it, let’s just build on it,” Carry said. “We want to be in a position where we have 60 or 70 people who want to play for the Liberty. Right now, we have a core, we know who they are and how they play and that means we have something we can really start on as we build.”
This is a talent-laden area for soccer and the club’s goal is to forge the kind of continuity that teams like Fever SC – a roster full of standouts from lower Bucks County programs like Pennsbury and Neshaminy – or Penn Fusion have where they can field an extremely competitive team and training environment. The majority of a player’s growth is done out of season, so providing a venue for a competitive opportunity in that time is an asset the players on the team really appreciate and the coaches hope more want to take advantage of going forward.
Technically, the Liberty are a year ahead of plan. Realistically, they’re right where they want to be, giving players an opportunity to improve.
“Every player brings something different from their college team to this team, so you’re always learning, practicing and seeing the different things they’re bringing,” DeHaven said. “It’s a competitive learning environment and that’s only helping me grow.
“You don’t ever want to stop playing, you want to keep growing. I definitely want to come back, I hope they all want to come back too and that this team continues to grow and stay competitive in this league.”